Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  If the Farewell Sermon of his friend Muhammad had shadowed forth the way in which Islam would grow into a universal, fraternal faith, then Abu Bakr’s last address intimated how it might develop into a secular empire, but one that would be haunted by the spectres of his own people’s disunity:

  Today you live in an age succeeding that of prophecy, at a fork in the path of pilgrimage. After me you will see despotic rule, deviant rule, a bold community, blood shed . . . So cling to the places of prayer and take the Qur’an as your counsel. Hold fast to obedience and do not abandon unity . . . And then, just as the nearer lands have been opened up to you, so too will the further lands.

  PRUNING THE UNCIRCUMCISED

  Abu Bakr and his commanders and envoys had wielded the stick to beat, goad and guide the rebels back into line. Under his successor, Umar, whom Abu Bakr probably designated before his death, came the carrot – conquest – that would tempt the caravan on . . . and on, into ever further lands. It would get to the ends of the earth, and gather fellow travellers wherever it went. The new adherents would soon come to outnumber by far the original, Arab members. And yet the latter would never entirely discard their less useful baggage – the tribal and racial impedimenta that they brought out of Arabia. For some, that load has kept them weighed down in earthly matters and stopped them looking up to heaven.

  Early in Umar’s caliphate, however, Islam may in any case have been seen as a purely Arab project, its main aim the political one of unifying Arabic speakers – perhaps in the face of the Persian Threat, according to that alluring but unprovable theory. Certainly, the first campaigns beyond the peninsula proper would seek to unify arabophones. In the northern regions of the subcontinent, the marginal world of Arabia slotted into the main body of Eurasia with its Greek, Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Roman, Sasanian and Byzantine heritage. The junction itself, the northern Fertile Crescent, had its own even longer and richer heritage; in more recent centuries, however, under Ghassanid and Lakhmid rule, speakers of Arabic had infiltrated (or, looking at the longer history of migrations, returned to) these lands, and were interspersed among speakers of the cousin-language, Aramaic. More recently still, Meccans had come to know the area well through trade; the father of that wealthy pillar of the Meccan Establishment, Abu Sufyan, had even bought estates in Byzantine territory. Arabs may have had an ‘island’ as their principal residence; but it was, to use the estate agents’ term, link-detached and most of the folks next door were at least linguistic family.

  In the western part of the Crescent and in its Egyptian extension, Byzantium had suffered recent and embarrassing defeats by a briefly resurgent Persia. In the 620s, however, while Muhammad was fighting the pagan Meccans, the emperor Heraclius was pushing the Persians back; by the end of the decade, he had restored lost Byzantine territory. But whereas the old imperial Goliaths had come out of their struggle battered, exhausted and scowling at each other, the young Arabian movement had emerged from its own conflict stronger than ever. Now, in 633, with the whole of their peninsula at last united (at least in theory) by ideology, led by sophisticated caravan-chiefs-turned-tacticians, and above all raring to raid, Arabs were no longer the puny herdboys who had annoyed the Assyrians and their successor empires.

  These developments had not yet sunk into the Byzantine consciousness, and when a force of 24,000 appeared in their territory – not from across the usual eastern front with the Persians but from the south, Arabia, the place next door to nowhere – they were caught napping. Moreover, if the Arab forces were lightly armed, their camel+horse combination gave them the invincible weapons of speed and manoeuvrability. Most of the scattered Byzantine garrisons melted away; the tribal Arab population went quietly over to the Muslim side. The ‘natives’, the Aramaic-speaking peasantry, were conspicuous only by their silence.

  Did the Arabic- and Aramaic-speaking Christians of the region see the Muslim invaders as slightly weird co-religionists? It is quite possible. At the time, Islam may still have been much more doctrinally malleable than its own later, fossilizing historians would lead us to think. Besides, the outward forms of prayer were not dissimilar; for example, Muslims shared with Christians in the region the practice of prostration (still part of ritual in the Syrian Orthodox Church). In major cities including Damascus and Hims, as well as in rural regions like the Negev, they also shared churches – something that would have been uncomfortable if each side had viewed the other as hell-bound heretics. In Damascus, soon to be the new caliphal capital, that cohabitation lasted no less than seventy years: at its mosque-basilica, Muslims and Christians ‘entered by the same doorway . . . Then the Christians turned to the west towards their church, and the Muslims to the right to reach their mosque’. Cohabitation also spread beyond the realm of religious real estate: the future St John of Damascus, for example, would not only work as a tax official for the Muslims but also become a courtier and drinking partner of the caliphal family. Meanwhile, a long history of intellectual transfer began when a prince of the family hired a Greek monk named Marianus to teach him medicine and alchemy.

  What is in little doubt is that the local Monophysite Christian majority of the region, looked down on as heretics by Constantinople, actively preferred Muslim to Byzantine rule. As for the Jews, it is claimed that in Hims they swore on the Torah that they would never have another Byzantine governor. What mattered to all of them, as to most people in most ages, is that they could get on with their lives without being messed about too much. It was what would matter also to the Christian and other inhabitants of Persian-run lands and to the Copts of Egypt, all soon to fall to the state of Medina. Though perhaps ‘fall’ is not the word: defending armies fought and fell, to be sure; the non-combatant majority bowed to the new rule, grumbled at the new taxes, realized that they weren’t that bad, and carried on.

  That does not mean it was all a walkover for the Arab forces. There were sieges: the Arabs had to invest the city of Caesarea on the coast of Palestine for a reported seven years before it capitulated in 640 (it was well defended, but no doubt a zero or two have crept into the ‘100,000’ troops guarding its walls; also, the ‘seven years’ may have been closer to seven months). There was heroism and carnage: an Arab woman, just married and then just widowed in the battle of Marj al-Suffar, went beserk with a tent-pole and killed seven Byzantine soldiers. And there was al-Yarmuk. Named after a river that descends westward to the Jordan Valley near the sea of Galilee, the Battle of al-Yarmuk saw the entire Arab army of 24,000 massing and facing a Byzantine force of at least that number. For a month in the summer of 636, heavy but sporadic fighting flared and died about the foothills of the Golan Heights, before a final mass encounter in which Khalid ibn al-Walid – that successful but not altogether scrupulous captain of the Wars of Apostasy – broke the Byzantine ranks and oversaw their slaughter in the Yarmuk gorges.

  Again, Arab women did their bit – including the cheerleading, firebreathing, liver-gnawing poetess, Hind the wife of Abu Sufyan, now on message for the Muslims. This time she encouraged the troops with the cry, ‘Go on! Prune the Foreskinned Ones with your swords!’ But if in Hind’s mind the battle was one between the ‘Roundheads’ and ‘Cavaliers’ of British schoolboy parlance – the circumcised and the uncircumcised – in reality things were not so clear-cut. Al-Yarmuk was not a battle between Arabs and non-Arabs. Far from it: the Byzantine side relied on contingents of Arab troops from Ghassan, Lakhm, Judham, Tanukh, Iyad and other tribes. The commander of the Byzantine vanguard was the Arab Ghassanid king, Jabalah ibn al-Ayham, whose ancestral palace-camp of al-Jabiyah overlooked the battlegrounds. To confuse matters further, Jabalah is said to have switched sides in the middle of the conflict on the grounds that his opponents from the Medinan tribes of Aws and Khazraj were in fact his ‘brothers’ (they were all of distant South Arabian origin). He is also said to have professed Islam and then, threatened with punishment by Caliph Umar for slapping a man, to have returned to the fold of Constantinople and Christianity: ‘I will
not remain in a land where others rule me,’ he declared, still regal. Like so many others, he had not taken in the political implications of Islam. For Jabalah, blood-ties had trumped older political loyalties; but, in the end, personal honour and independence had trumped all the rest, Islam included.

  THE WEST OF THE EAST

  In their early encounters with the Byzantines, Arabs as often as not found themselves up against their pre-Islamic selves, men like Jabalah the Ghassanid. In their great simultaneous clash with Persia, Arabs were fighting the Other that had so long defined them.

  The otherness is clear in stories like that of the Arab chieftain al-Mughirah parleying with the enthroned Sasanian general and virtual regent, Rustam, and idly poking holes with his spear in the latter’s vast and precious Persian carpet – and then trying to cosy up beside the shocked paladin on his throne. Arabs may have been oiks, their historians wish to say, but they would get their turn on the throne; the protocol-ridden Persians were as decadent as their empire. In this attitude Arabs shared, unconsciously, the old Greek and Roman view of Persians as effete and dissolute; like their predecessors, they saw themselves as epic heroes versus epicene Orientals. Even this early on, they were the West of the East, as Lévi-Strauss has described Islam.

  Given negotiators like al-Mughirah, it is not surprising that the Arab advance into Persian territory led to another great battle, ultimately even more fateful to the Sasanians than the rout of al-Yarmuk had been to Byzantium. The latter survived another eight centuries, at times fighting back, at others behaving as a truculent satellite of the Arabs. In contrast, the last of the Sasanian shahs, Yazdgard III, resisted for a while, but within little more than a decade ended up stabbed and thrown into a Central Asian river. The old Persian empire died with him. Simple geography helped: the Persian capital, Ctesiphon, lay at the Arabian end of the empire, right in the path of the Arab advance; Constantinople, on the other hand, was insulated from the Arabian subcontinent by nearly 1,000 kilometres of Asia Minor.

  The date of the decisive battle has never been agreed upon, but it fell at some time between 636 and 638. What is certain is that for Medina to take on the two superpowers at almost the same time was either mad or inspired. Nor is the site of the battle in dispute – a spot called al-Qadisiyyah, a day or so from the Lakhmid capital of al-Hirah, and lying where Fertile Crescent became infertile steppeland. Arab forces arriving from Medina may have numbered 12,000. Behind them they had their harsh bright ‘island’; before them the legendary Sawad of Iraq, that ‘Blackness’ of dark green palmeries, moist earth and meandering canals that had drawn Arab raiders since time out of mind. They also had before them a Persian army under Rustam that was a lot bigger than their own – 120,000 by some accounts, although one suspects that the David-and-Goliath syndrome is at work again among Islamic historians, as it had been at Caesarea. As usual, speed and manoeuvrability were important early on, but the thick of the battle was waged mostly on foot, and in the end it was archery that proved decisive. ‘Spindles! Spindles!’ the Persian troops would yell as yet another swarm of angry Arab arrows headed for them. But they were spindles ‘that would rip through the heavy breastplates and double layers of chain-mail that we wore.’ Al-Qadisiyyah was the Arab Agincourt.

  Arab archery, perfected since ancient times by sharpshooters hunting game in the bare tracts of the peninsula, might have been deadly at a distance, but most Arabs’ horizons were still limited to raiding the neighbours. There was a single palm-tree at al-Qadisiyyah, and wounded Arab warriors would catch sight of it and ask, ‘Are we nearly at the Sawad yet?’ They were, and that palmy land was now theirs. But the greater empire, extending to the Persian heartland of Fars, the far plains rising to the highlands of Armenia and rolling across Asia to the Oxus and the borders of Sind – a territory as big as the entire Arabian subcontinent – all that was for now beyond the imagination of most Arabs. It makes the contrast between the two sides the wider, the bathos of the fall of an ancient power the greater. So too do vignettes of the aftermath of the battle: the captured Persian imperial baker, mounted on a mule, wearing silk brocade and a cap of cloth of gold, surrounded by ceremonial caskets filled with cream cakes and honeycombs; the last of the thirty Persian war elephants, bought by an entrepreneur to be taken on tour and shown, disgruntled, to goggling Arabs.

  The fall of the house of Sasan also brought down the remains of its old Arab outhouse, the Lakhmid dynasty. With them fell their capital, al-Hirah, the ancient home of Arabic poetry and writing and, arguably, the birthplace of a united Arab identity. Huraqah, the daughter of al-Nu’man III, patron of poets, who used to ride to her estates along roads spread with silk, now came in sackcloth to beg alms from the Arab victor of al-Qadisiyyah. Al-Hirah itself was soon a ruin haunted by monks; another princess, Hind, now a blind nun, enjoyed a twilight reputation there as an expert on ancient Arabia. But at last even these ghosts of the Arab past faded and the ancient metropolis was home only to owls and to sada, spirit-birds that emerge from the skulls of the dead. Al-Hirah, abandoned, rotted away like Babylon or Chernobyl.

  The expanding state of Medina would create other ruins and other ghosts. In the far south-west of Arabia, where the old civilization of Saba and Himyar had fallen first to Ethiopians, then to Persians, the ancient Sabaean palace of Ghumdan with its alabaster windows and bronze beasts had survived. It was demolished partially in the time of Muhammad, and almost completely in that of his third successor Uthman. Sometimes the destruction was personal, and wanton. A young and zealous recruit to Islam came across the aged warrior-hero, Durayd ibn al-Simmah, who had clung to his pagan ways. The youth tried to kill him, dealing him several inexpert blows. ‘Do it with my sword,’ Durayd said. The hero’s blade killed its owner instantly. Dead and exposed, Durayd’s buttocks and thighs were seen to be like papyrus from years of bareback riding. ‘The man you killed,’ the zealot’s mother told him later, ‘set free from captivity three generations of your ancestresses.’ The ghosts of tribal heroes, of al-Hirah and Himyar, were family ghosts; but the new Islamic generation left their haunted ancestral home without regrets. They turned their backs on a past that Islam had branded al-Jahiliyyah, the Ignorance. Jahl is the ignorance of childhood, and Arabs had grown up.

  Later, although in fact not much later, when the youthful zeal of Islam began to pass to others – resurgent Persians, insurgent Turks – Arabs would look back and see the Ignorance as blissful, a Golden Age, a pre-dawn glow that was their very own before the universal enlightenment of Islam. It was the memory of that glow that kept a flicker of arabness alive through the long millennium in which the torch of Islam was in the hands of others. It was the same flicker that in the nineteenth century would reignite a sense of Arab greatness and unity, an ‘Awakening’. But in the first flush of that youth, Arabs went out of Arabia without a backward glance, as if obedient to the pre-Islamic belief that a traveller who looked behind him as he set out would never complete his journey. The forwardness – the frowardness – worked: the headlong fall of Persian and Byzantine lands was due to lacklustre opposition and to that ever-underestimated military quantity, luck (or in Islamic terms, Allah). It was not due to conventionally wise strategy, unless taking on two empires at once is wisdom. But it was also due to sheer momentum. Qurashi generals had gained plenty of practical experience in the Riddah wars, but they also possessed large amounts of chutzpah. Khalid ibn al-Walid is said for example to have led his men across the Syrian desert, slaughtering their camels to drink the juices in their stomachs.

  In the end, however, the relentless forward policy simply had to work. The futuhat, the Arab conquests of the first Islamic century – in their most basic sense the ‘openings-up’ – were the super-raids of inveterate predators who, now united, could no longer raid each other or their settled fellow Arabians. If you pray with each other, you shouldn’t prey on each other; that, at least, is the theory. One might well ask if tribal Arabs could have found another economic basis to existence than raidin
g. It seems not; or not yet. Besides, the Meccan generals were only too happy to make use of the predatory propensity. As Hugh Kennedy puts it, ‘The leaders of the new state were fully aware that it had to expand or collapse’. Empires are usually thought to grow, like Marvell’s ‘vegetable love’, vast and slow. The empire of the Arabs arose like a soufflé.

  THE SONS OF AL-ABBAS

  The rise of Arab power did not follow the rules governing the growth of empires; it was, as Ibn Khaldun said, exceptional and miraculous. Certainly, the conjunction of circumstances that enabled the expansion – the war-weariness of the neighbouring empires, the battle-hardness of Arabs, disaffection and disunity among the Byzantine- and Persian-ruled populace, Arabs united by an Islamic ideology with an irresistible rhetoric – was all more than anyone could have dared to pray for. But there would be a price: it seems to be a rule of empires, miraculous or otherwise, that the quicker they are won the shorter they last (the Macedonian, the Mongol, the Napoleonic); again on the soufflé principle, they soon collapse, if they are not first wolfed down by others hungry for power. Conversely, slow-grown empires (the Roman, the Chinese, the Russian) live longer. Arabs would control their own united empire for about two hundred years. (The cultural empire that it inspired is, of course, still up and running.)

  For the first hundred years or so Arabs were on a roll that mixed raiding tactics with more formal warfare. Having won a pitched battle, they would send out saraya, bedouin-style raiding parties, to pursue fleeing opponents and generally show the non-combatant peasantry who was in charge. It was a winning formula, combining doggedness and élan, like the old pairing of camel and horse. It is also another case where features of settled hadar and mobile badw society – in this case, their respective military tactics – are employed together and to great effect. In general, however, the emphasis was on lightness and mobility, unencumbered by lumbering baggage trains. A camel-borne column is its own baggage train; and in any case, an Arab warrior’s kit was basic: a shield, a coat of mail, a helmet, one large needle and five small ones, linen thread, broadsword, scissors, nosebag, and a palm-leaf basket, as well as his other weapons – usually lance and bow – and his horse. As treasure from the newly plundered and taxed provinces began to flood into the central treasury at Medina, Caliph Umar endeavoured to pay warriors 4,000 dirhams (over ten kilogrammes of silver) up front – a thousand each for his travel, weapons and mount, and a thousand to leave with his family.